Fun

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)

I guess it’s such an obvious rebus^WP scores of people must have had it already, but I’d never seen it before, it just occurred to me this morning, and am quite fancying it right now. (Pretty cherry from Kainoatec)

From the surprise interview of Sergey Brin^WP, Google’s cofounder, at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. The notes ↓ here are just to guide you, you have to hear either the clip or the full interview at ITConversations to get how witty^EEM this is.

This is some fiendishly impressive photoshop.

Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.

I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)

From an Our Living Language note on the defintion of the word “like”^A on the American Heritage Dictionary:

An epithet is a term used to characterize a person or a thing—a meaningful nickname if you will—and I’ve been obsessed with them (through my obsession with self-definition) for a long time. Examples abound, from the simple Dougie Houser, MD, to Warrren Buffet, the sage of Omaha:

• Claude Piron^WP, famous Esperantist and psychotherapist, calls himself ”plifelicxigisto” (literally, more-happy-maker), because most of the people that come to him don’t do it because of a particular ailment but because they want to enjoy life more.
• Piron also famously described Esperanto as ”la bona lingvo” (“the good language”).
• Margaret Thatcher is “the Iron Lady”.
• Guadalajara^WP prouds itself as “The Pearl of The West.”
• Among the X-Men, mutant Forge^WP, whose special power is technological brilliance (that is, a superhuman ability to understand, conceive, and build machines), is often referred as “Maker” (and that has got to be the coolest, most heretical epithet ever).
• William Gibson^WP is invariably introduced as “the coiner of the term ‘cyberspace’”.
• William Shakespeare is “the Bard (of Avon)”.
• Steven Johnson describes himself numerically as “a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books.”
• Lord Voldemort^WP is best known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.
• Benito Juarez^WP is the ”Benemérito de las Américas” (“the meritious one of the Americas”).
• Juan Gabriel^WP is fittingly called “El divo de México” (“Mexico’s male diva”).
• In role-playing games epithets according to your level and race are common; I remember Erasmo, who usually used Yang, an assassin, as his main character, really fancied his early-level epithet: “Yang, the man.”
• Adolfo calls himself (amusingly) an “infoplebeian.”
• Carl Friedrich Gauss^WP is “the prince of mathematicians.”
• Madonna^WP has long been known as “the material girl.”
• Shiva is usually “the destroyer”, but he is given thousands of names^WP in Hindu scriptures.
• Satan is “the prince of darkness”, or, in Michael Bakunin’s famous description in God and the State, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker, the emancipator of worlds.”
• Jaime Sabines wondered, upon being called “a great poet”, if he could even be considered, simply, but truly, “a poet”—only to conclude he’s actually just “a pedestrian.”

I could go on forever.

But on a more pedestrian note (or not) what epithets do you fancy for yourself?

Without any pretense of deserving any of them, I personally like webcraftsman, formist^ELZR, and whimsicist^ELZR (which I stole shamelessly from someone I can’t remember now!). Other favorites, preceded with the same warning as before, include singularitarian, amateur, (techno-)libertarian, anarchocapitalsit, dynamist, reader, freethinker, and designer—this last one with or without any qualification, but I’m particularly fond of interface designer and analytic designer. Symbolist would also be a nice (undeserved) compliment and so would hacker. As of this moment, perhaps my favorite epithet of all is conceptual designer—a huge post on the subject upcoming.

For my webfront and brand-to-be, , I came up with the sloganesque epithet of “avantgarde webcraft” and I quite like it.

But really, I’m all ears, what labels look good on you? (And you don’t have to write them here, just think about it, between you and you.)

This time a fascinating little gem from the cover article, The Expert Mind, of this month’s Scientific American: The month you were born plays decisive importance into whether you’ll become a professional soccer player or not. That’s a fact.

I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s wonderful, mocking account of how he became a scientist (which appears in John Brockman’s Curious Minds, a book I’ve praised lavishly already).